Monitoring and Evaluation

Why?

Monitoring and evaluation is ESSENTIAL to any organisation and can be incredibly beneficial. It shouldn’t just be about what is necessary to please the funders, but also about how it benefits the organisation and all its stakeholders.

There are a number of terms involved in monitoring and evaluation. Confusingly, different funders and organisations use different terms and different definitions (i.e. aims are sometimes goals).

Some organisations want to understand why are outcomes and their measurement important? Why measure them alongside outputs? And what do they tell you that’s unique?

What?

In your work, you’re most likely to be focussing on outcomes in individuals and there are a number of different aspects of an individual where changes can take place

We will assist to take routine, systematic information for the purpose of checking your project’s progress against your project’s plans and turn them into practical measures you can assess and evaluate.

For example, with facilitated workshops and focus groups we can devise useful information and processes to:

Tell you the actual effect of the work you are doing

Enable you to track gradual change

Validate prevention work effectiveness

Help you to report to funders and attract further information (to show that you are a learning organisation)

Save you time (if you plan your work around what has been proved to work and if you make sure you only collect what you need to, not just what has always been collected by the organisation)

As you will know, just because the final, ideal outcome has not been reached, it does not mean that some positive change has occurred in the client’s life. There are signs along the way that the service is having a positive effect, small steps that are and even in cases of relapse and ‘bad weeks’, for example, when the service is not engaged with, you can still capture the progress, small or otherwise.

With your input we help identify intermediate outcomes by looking at the main outcome to come up with the stages which form the journey towards achieving the results.

We help you think about what steps you think key to a clients’ progress – what achievements you see as accomplishments when working with a client and put these into the order in which they usually take place.

Top Tip: If you’re already collecting this data, then that’s great and you can continue to use this, for a number of projects. Also, think carefully about all the data you collect, which you might not necessarily see as traditional monitoring and evaluation data. For example, case notes contain an awful lot of information, and maybe you can think about how this can be used? Perhaps there are judgements from counsellors which equate to evidence of improvement, or comments from service users.NB: If using this kind of data, you need to be careful about confidentiality – you may need to get permission to use this data beforehand or make sure that it’s anonymised.